Mom logic isn’t

Do they think we won’t catch them and rub their noses in their attempted deception? Or are they so stupid that they can’t read the actual numbers? And they have the tag line “Real Stories. Real Honest. Real Moms”.

The lady doth insist too much, methinks.

Here are the scare quotes:

More than 500 children die annually from accidental gunshots. Some shoot themselves, while others kill friends or siblings after discovering a gun.

Here are more scary stats: Americans own 200 million firearms, and 35 percent of homes contain at least one gun. Last year, a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than 1.7 million children live in homes with loaded and unlocked guns.

The problem is that according to the CDC we have this data (2006 is the most recent I found–see table 10):

Cause of death (based on ICD, 2004) All ages Under 1 year 1-4 years 5-14 years 15-24 years 25-34 years 35-44 years 45-54 years 55-64 years 65-74 years 75-84 years 85 years and over
Accidental discharge of firearms (W32-W34) 642 13 41 193 113 74 84 49 33 34 8

So in order to arrive at “more than 500 children die annually” you would have to include “children” as old as 54 years old. Sure a lot of people want the government to treat people as children even at this age but it’s lying to actually include them in your children totals.

The real number is 54 children per year instead of “more than 500”. They are only off by a factor of 10.

So, assuming their 1.7 million number is right then the odds of one of those children in homes with loaded and unlocked guns accidentally being killed with a firearm is 54/1,700,000 or 1 in 31,481 (0.0032%) per year.

Gee… I wonder if they have an agenda. If they don’t then why do they inflate the numbers by a factor of 10? Crap for brains and/or the truth is just too inconvenient for them? You decide.

Share

9 thoughts on “Mom logic isn’t

  1. It’d be nice to know the 5-8, 9-11, 12-14 breakdown of the 5-8 category, too. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it skews heavily toward the older kids.

  2. I wonder if they aren’t including suicides in that 500+ number since it does say “shoot themselves”? There is a certain segment of our population who sincerely believe that gun suicides are accidental. Also, WISQARS lets you include the numbers for ages 15 to 19.

  3. ubu52,

    The article does say “accidental” and from reading the report you will find suicides are broken out separately. I agree it’s possible some suicides were mistakenly or even intentionally classified as “accidental”. But that would be an issue to take up with the CDC and the people that did the classification.

    But my complaint in this post is with the writer of the article. It seems to me they were either sloppy with the facts or intentionally lying to make their agenda more palatable.

  4. Ha! The longer I’m on these interwebz, the more I believe statistics only exist to be twisted to whatever agenda a person wants to twist them to. It kind of reminds me of doing corporate budgets (variance analysis) and five year plans.

    Regarding the accidental suicides, I’m just using “mom logic.” For some moms, and others, it’s more palatable to claim Junior accidentally shot himself cleaning his gun wth the barrel in his mouth. They just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that Junior was really unhappy with his life and shot himself deliberately.

    I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this http://www.mydeathspace.com/article/2008/01/04/Patrick_McClure_(21)_died_from_an_accidental_gunshot_wound (Warning, it’s disturbing).

  5. Of course, if they were really concerned about all the darling little kids, they’d be focusing on other things, like bicycle safety, water safety, motor vehicle and driving safety, et al, any one of which overwhelms gun accidents as a risk. Nor do they ever acknowledge the darling children’s lives that have been save through the use of civilian armed defense. Odd, isn’t that? I mean, if it can save just one life, shouldn’t we encourage concealed carry permit holders to carry their guns in schools? Furthermore, they’d be looking at the socialist dictatorships around the world, wherein kids are starving and worse, and they’d be finding ways to spread liberty. They’d not be foisting more government restrictions on Americans. I therefore conclude that they are nothing but unprincipled, despicable political hacks using children as props to tug at our heartstrings. These hacks take two forms; the perpetrators (who know and understand their tactics as fraudulent) and the duped (who fall for it and go along). We can reduce their assertions to one simple sentence that puts it all nicely into perspective; “Human rights are bad for children.”
    or
    “The right to defend life kills kids.”

    I am fond of pointing out that although you will find a paramedic team and an ambulance on standby at many school sporting events (including all football games– a local Whitman County girl was hauled off to the hospital from a basketball game just last week) you do NOT see paramedics on call at shooting events, including school-sanctioned shooting competitions.

    MY children are going to keep their rights, thank you very much. Leave them and me alone if you know what’s good for you.

  6. Furthermore; Did you know that our precious child labor laws are often exempted for one of the most dangerous industries? Tell THAT to the anti gun retards who LOVE my kids SO MUCH that they want to take away their rights.

    I’ll let y’all guess what industry I’m referencing. Hint; driver’s licensing requirements are also often relaxed or overlooked for this industry. For kids. In one of the most dangerous industries. No one is carry picket signs or distributing pamphlets, or putting up web sites demanding their legislators put a stop to it. They’re not even thinking about it. Because they don’t really give a fuck about kids. Because they’re just retarded political hacks who hate your and your kid’s freedoms, and this dangerous industry (which you will no doubt already have identified) isn’t on their hit list.

  7. Don’t be too sure the industry Lyle discusses isn’t on their list. Remember “sea kittens?” And what about the VLF? (You have heard of the ALF and ELF, surely). Well, the Vegetable Liberation Front shall rise. Free The Broccoli! Power to the Peas! Lentil Liberty!

    To be slightly on topic, it is not about facts or freedom with the Moms and their ilk, but feelings. And icky weapons (and liberty) scare ’em bad. It is not a lie if you tell it Big enough, remember? But the moms are pikers, so it is lies.

  8. I wonder if anyone has done research to determine how many children, say under age 5, are killed in the US each year by an abusive mother.

    If you looked at that as a ratio of #born to #killed, I’d wager a dollar to a doughnut that it’s a might higher than .00032%

    Turns out, according to http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_14.pdf, table 9, p31, that from newborn through age 4, there is a 10.3 per 100000 death rate.(2006 data) for homicide. No exact figures for mothers.

    So obviously, the right thing to do is to either take these precious children out of the hands of all mothers, or force mothers to register themselves (or fathers to register the mothers.)

    Since these mothers are too dangerous, (I mean c’mon, one child is too many) I say we should immediately place a ban on all mothers–or at the very least, high capacity “assault mothers.” Mothers who have items like large, child bearing hips, or are physically attractive (as this will cause men to impregnate them, perpetuating the cycle) or show a propensity for having multiple births.

    First we need a registration system to make sure we know where these mothers are, and then we need to ensure that these women are somehow kept in a state where they can’t accidentally become mothers. We need to make sure that children are made aware that all mothers can kill, and are inherently dangerous and evil. Also we must ensure that all children are taught in school that mothers kill, and a zero-tolerance for mothers in “Mother safe zones” is established on all schools.

    Mothers shall not be allowed in courtrooms or public government buildings, or banks, and may not be displayed in public unless the person displaying them is properly trained ad licensed. Persons wishing to make a woman into a mother must also pass a federal background check. A reasonable waiting period before motherhood should also be determined. It should also be illegal for a woman to be the mother of a small child until she is 21, or a large child until she is 18.

    Seems fair, right? After all, it’s for the children.

  9. Those numbers are terrifying! Only 35% of the households in the US have at least one gun?!? We gottta get those numbers up, asap! 😀

Comments are closed.